The main concept is that the player’s actions effect the movement of the blocks to be avoided. This in essence makes the player their own worst enemy. I was experimenting around with nested spring feedback systems and this concept of player as AI when I stumbled upon a fun and playable prototype that went on to become this game.

I spent about 7 days developing the version I submitted to the Experimental Gameplay Project website and then I worked for a bit longer polishing it up to get it ready to seek sponsorship.  I’m happy to report that Armor Games picked up the primary sponsorship on it and Contentric officially launched yesterday!

It was great to work with Dan from Armor Games and I definitely recommend them to any other flash developers out there who are looking for a good sponsor.

I’m really quite happy with how this game came together.  I was able to get a ton of playtesting feedback early on which really helped me perfect the gameplay to where I wanted it.  I also got to write the music for the game which people seem to be enjoying as well so that is always a treat.

Here is a gameplay trailer I put together with some rough edits that show me getting a little over 13,000 points.

As usual I welcome any feedback positive or negative and would love to hear from you.

My Flash game Robot Reaction is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

You can play the free Flash version of the iPhone game at robotreaction.com and buy the game for 99 cents in the App Store. I worked on the iPhone version in collaboration with One App At A Time.

The goal is to try and blow up as many robots as you can in ten fast paced rounds. There are six different robot types which all explode in different ways.

Here is a gameplay video of the iPhone version in action:

Concept:

Help the atom on each level recover its lost electrons! You only have 60 seconds total to collect all 100 missing electrons from the different levels.

The screenshot above shows 4 of the 20 available levels.  10 levels are picked at random each time you play.  The entire game only lasts 60 seconds (as per the contest rules.)

I created the background textures by cropping and filtering some lovely watercolor textures made by Hillary Luetkemeyer.  The artist released them for use and remix under a CC Attribution license.

Feel free to leave any feedback below in the comments.

Play Power Vacuum

I have done a few illustrations for this game working through various game mechanics, styles, and ideas.

This is a useful creative tool for me to rapidly try out different concepts and see what they might look like before I even write a single line of code or start creating any game assets.

Creating concept art becomes a way I can immerse myself in the world and atmosphere of the game ahead of time because as I am drawing these illustrations I am imagining the various aspects of the gameplay occurring.  This can even include me making hand gestures and sound effects without me realizing it as I try out the game in my mind’s eye.  As embarrassing as that might sound for some people it has been something I’ve done unashamedly since I first started drawing as a child.  It makes the experience that much more involved and creatively useful for me.

The mechanics of the game are fluid and easy to change when I am prototyping with illustrations so I can work through many ideas quickly as I form my plan about what to implement in the first prototype. It also serves as a way to get myself psyched about the game and really feeling the emotion and experience I want to try and create for the player.

This latest game has been inspired by a specific title I came up with yesterday.  I’ve been brainstorming various game ideas for it and think I’ve finally settled on a concept I want to implement a prototype of. I’ll keep the title in reserve for now but I expect to make a few more updates along the development cycle.

If you are a game designer feel free to let me know a little about your creative process when you are beginning with a new game.  I have used many different approaches and there are obviously many ways to do it.  I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has used a concept art driven approach to good effect with their games.

I have just completed a new Flash game called Worderfall this month with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell.  This time around it is a word game that utilizes an extremely large database of valid English words.

The concept is a fairly simple one.  You have three minutes to create as many high scoring words as you can.  The game increases pace with each minute that passes.  There are a ton of game statistics that are tracked as well for those who would like to improve their scores or at least measure their progress.

Here is a game play video which explains how to play:

Here is a game play screenshot:

I welcome your feedback and thoughts positive or negative.  Thanks for giving it a try!

“It involves using the vast, super-complicated structure of Wikipedia as a play space, an environment through which one player chases another. I like to think of it as a kind of competitive parkour through the architecture of all human knowledge, but calling it “tag” is a little simpler. It’s easy to learn and loads of fun.” – Jeremy

Here is the complete version 1.0 ruleset posted with permission.

WIKIPEDIAN TAG – Version 1.0

OBJECT

Same as regular tag: for one player (“It”) to catch another player.

SETUP

• Find a free block of time. About an hour is good.
• Find at least one other player. The game can be played either in the physical presence of the other player(s), or remotely (I’ve played it a number of times using Gchat).
• Determine one player to be “It” (who I will also refer to as “the chaser”) and one player to be the one who is being chased by it (who I will also refer to as “the runner”)
• Each player privately selects a page in Wikipedia—any page—to be their starting point. Once both players have made their selections, they reveal their starting points, and the game begins.
• The chaser goes first.

GAMEPLAY

• Players take turns.
• On each turn, a player “moves” by following at least one link that leads from a Wikipedia page to another Wikipedia page.
• The chaser is faster than the runner, so on each turn the chaser gets to move twice. For instance, if the chaser was on the page for Brooklyn, they could move to the page for Yiddish and then from there to Aramaic. This would constitute a complete turn for the chaser.
• The runner has the advantage of unpredictable mobility, so s/he is only permitted one move per turn.
• Each player reports their moves as they make them, so that both players know the location of the other player at all times. The runner may look at the page the chaser is on, and the reverse is also true.
• If, at any time, the chaser is on the same page as the runner, the runner is “tagged” and the game ends. (In the above example, if the runner was on the “Aramaic” page, s/he would be tagged.)
• Confused? Check out the sample games below.

A RESTRICTION ON THE RUNNER

• The nimble runner has one restriction upon her or his mobility: s/he may only follow links that are one word. This means, for example, that s/he cannot follow links to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or the List of fictional games or even Thomas Jefferson.
• Note that some one-word links do direct to pages with multi-word titles; these are fair game for the runner. For instance, the runner could reach the Thomas Jefferson page legally if the link read simply “Jefferson.”
• Acronyms such as IBM count as one word and thus are legal, as do hyphenated words.
• Note that this restriction can occasionally lead the runner onto a page for which there is no legal escape: in this case the runner must use her or his next turn to “backtrack” to the page they s/he was on previously.

A RESTRICTION ON THE CHASER

• The relentless chaser also has one restriction upon her or his mobility: s/he may not reduplicate any exact move made by the runner. S/he must find a creative route to where the runner is rather than simply locking in to an earlier point on the runner’s trail and catching up using the brute force of their superior speed.

RESTRICTIONS ON BOTH PLAYERS

• Neither player may follow a link that will take them outside of Wikipedia. Be especially cautious about accidentally following links that might take you to a Wikipedia “sister project” such as Wiktionary or Wikiquote.
• Neither player may use the links in the left sidebar, including but not limited to the “What links here” tool in the toolbox.
• Players must move: neither player may pass a turn or a portion of their turn.
• While it is legal for players to look at the page their opponent is on, it is considered bad form to look at other pages in Wikipedia during the course of the game, and it is illegal to “peek ahead” to see the content of a page you are thinking about visiting as part of a future move.
• Despite the occasional strong temptation to do so, neither player may do any editing to Wikipedia during the course of the game.

SOME VARIATIONS

• Variations for more than two players are simple: you may play a game where there is one runner being pursued by multiple chasers, or a game where one chaser is pursuing multiple runners. In either of these variants, the players who are “multiplied” in this fashion make their moves concurrently.
• In the basic game, as in real Tag, the game continues until the chaser catches the runner, or until the runner forfeits out of exhaustion. More satisfying end-games can sometimes be generated by an agreement, before starting play, as to how many turns the game will last before the runner will be considered victorious. (I’d recommend 20 turns—20 moves for the runner and 40 for the chaser—although this can be adjusted for the time available or to reflect the relative skills of the players.)

TWO SAMPLE GAMES

Wikipedian Tag, by Jeremy P. Bushnell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

It has been almost 60 days since I released TurnStyle and as I’m gearing up again to do another big round of game development in the next few weeks I think this time is as good as any to get this off my plate.

I will share my MochiAd developer screenshots below:  I have created 3 reports all of which show the entire history of the game in the wild.  I will report my numbers on Traffic, Hosts, and Countries along with some of my own thoughts and markings on the screenshots:

(All images can be clicked on to view larger)

TurnStyle Traffic Data

The purple area on the image above represents the typical viral spike present in most games that are released on the internet.  I have looked at a ton of these graphs of released flash games and their signature is almost identical.  Yes there are bumps and spikes along the way depending on various sites or occurrences that may happen to your game but the underlying spike and then long tail down is the same.  The main difference between games is that the higher your spike is in the beginning then the higher the hits per day will run you during the long tail down.  TurnStyle has tapered off to generating around 100-200 plays a day now.  The highest spike I had was around 8500 or so and earned my around $3 in a single day. Woot!

The green area on the image above represents when I got approved for the excellent service called Flash Game Distribution by the same guys who run the Flash Game License site.  I was allowed access into the beta version of the service, submitted my game and enabled my options and got a nice spike in my traffic.  I can’t recommend them enough for how easy they make it to get a decent boost.  I imagine it paying off quite well on a more successful game.  In less than 15 minutes of your time you can have your game emailed to over 451 publishers, enabled for portals who subscribe to their game feed API, and use their manual submit accelerator to walk through 100s of the most popular portals which don’t have an auto-submit.  All your games data is featured on the left pane of a frame and you can paste it right into all the portals submit forms.  Cake!

TurnStyle Host Distribution Data

Here you see the hosts view from my MochiAds developer Stats page.  Once again I am viewing all date data for TurnStyle.  Early on my game got picked up by arcade.fi and got a ton of plays.  This was great for the players in Finland but not so great for my revenue.  You get paid various amounts depending on where you game is being played.  Every country and domain have different eCPMs that they pay.  This is due to all the various ad inventories or deals that have been struck between Mochi and the ad buyers.  If your game is played in certain countries you won’t get any revenue at all sometimes since there are no ad campaigns running there.

You can also see here that bored.com really gave me some great revenue as a single site.  As I mention in my image above, the MochiAds domain is listed as the top one because this is an artifact of the Mochi Distribution system.  Most publishers subscribing to their feed are going to be using the Mochi embed to save on hosting fees.

TurnStyle Country Distribution Data

Just for fun I thought I’d also include the country data for TurnStyle.  You can see the top 2 countries which aren’t that surprisingly are United States and United Kingdom but then something funny is that Finland is the 3rd highest.  Well I have no idea but they really enjoyed my game.  I was even using the Google translation tool to read the comments users were leaving in Finish and that was quite fun.

It has been a great learning experience self-publishing TurnStyle.  I couldn’t be happier for what knowledge I’ve gained about the Flash business space.  It has also shown me why working out better deals and new models with publishers will be crucial to running a successful Flash game studio.  I’m coming to see what I had read others talking about that MochiAds (and other ad networks for that matter) should be considered more as secondary or tertiary income or even a viable tool for getting some leverage in your dealings with sponsors and licensees of your game.  You should be aware that if they are asking you to remove your ads you should consider this in the cost of your sponsorship/license deal.

I am trying out Flash Game License for my new game Orange You Glad and it is going great so far.  I’ve had sponsor interest and am receiving bids so I’m quite thrilled with my progress on my second Flash game.  I will be posting more on my experiences in that department down the road I am sure!

Here is level 4 from a new Flash game I am making with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell. It marks the first collaboration Hybrid Mind Studios has done and I’m very excited about co-designing this game with Jeremy.

We’ve been working hard on this during the month of April.  I did an initial prototype in about 3 hours which I sent out to my play tester email list and initial response was very good.  Since then Jeremy has been working on creating 10 great levels, art assets, sounds, ambient loops, title and inter-level screens.  I have been programming the game engine and integrating all the levels and assets and coding in some nice animations for the different collectibles and units in the game.  We’ve both been playing the heck out of it too and working together to tune the game mechanics.

That’s all I’m gonna say about this new game for now but we plan to do another play tester release this weekend.  Probably on Sunday or Monday at the latest.  After that we will likely make any changes based on feedback and we’ll be posting it for developer review up on Flash Game License before finally opening it up to sponsor bidding.  You want to set the best first impression you can and make the best use of the sponsor’s valuable time when you are trying to monetize your Flash games!

I’ll have more info and a big announcement once the game secures a sponsorship and/or is ready to be released into the wild.  In the meantime I’m going to be combing my list of sponsor email addresses encouraging them to take a look at my game over on FGL.

TurnStyle is a unique visual and memory based puzzle game where each of the 15 puzzles are original illustrations that follow a complete story arc over the duration of the game.

Every puzzle is made up of individual pieces which have been randomly rotated so that they are scrambled each time. You must work quickly and efficiently to rotate the individual pieces into the proper alignment before the timer runs out.

There are easy, medium, and hard difficulty puzzles mainly guided by the amount of individual image pieces that make up each puzzle and the way that I break up the images into pieces.

Personal best records are stored locally for score and rotation count per puzzle. Global high scores may be submitted to the Mochi Leaderboards at any puzzle progress screen. You are able to retry a level if the time runs out.

The original game play idea came from my Cryptid Puzzle Challenge entry in the Mini-Ludum Dare #7 competition back at the beginning of the month.

I will try to post more about my adventure in creating this game and learning Flash but for now this is finished!